The Rothschilds have been through a few ups and downs in the past 250 years. But rarely has Europe’s most famous banking family been linked to an investment that has gone so wrong, so quickly, as Nat Rothschild’s involvement in Bumi. Two years ago the 41-year-old heir to Lord (Jacob) Rothschild

One of the criticisms of Adair Turner — chairman of the FSA and leading candidate to be the next Governor of the Bank of England — is that he can be a bit of showman. This tendency was on display in his speech on Thursday night. With less than two months to go before the Government announces the

After his drubbing by Mitt Romney in the TV debate this week, Barack Obama desperately needed yesterday’s employment figures to be good. And they were. Admittedly, the new job numbers were much as expected and remain fairly anaemic, with much of the growth coming from the public sector and

In May 2010 the IMF forecast that the Greek economy would shrink by about 1.5 per cent over the following two years and would by now being growing again. This turned out to be wrong. Not a little bit wrong. Wildly wrong. The Greek economy now looks set to contract by almost 14 per cent over that

Fierce price competition among suppliers is great news for consumers. Up to a point. If it reaches the stage where suppliers are losing money on the core product, consumers should beware. They are probably being fleeced in some other way. Take the banks. Because the price charged for in-credit

George Osborne must be feeling pretty friendless at the moment, with his handling of the economy under fire from all sides, including his own. But at least one important ally has come to his aid this week. In a rare television interview, Sir Mervyn King gave the Chancellor valuable cover if he is

Experts are so baffled by the strange behaviour of the British economy that some have resorted to an explanation that smacks of desperation. Zombies. The fact that employment is strong but output is weak and investment sluggish is being blamed on the hordes of the undead. The culprits are not the

Welcome to the parallel universe. In the old universe we used to inhabit, it was simply not possible that Glencore could offer more than 2.8 of its shares for each Xstrata to clinch an $88 billion mining merger. Or so said Xstrata’s chief executive Mick Davis, who described it as the best deal that

Banks have got such a bad name that you might think ministers would want to call a new state-backed funding body anything but a bank. Yet the Government has given birth to a whole family of new ones. First there was the Big Society Bank, then the Green Investment Bank and now we are being promised

We are grasping at straws on the economy these days. Output shrank a bit less than previously thought in the second quarter, according to revised official figures yesterday. But the 0.5 per cent contraction means that the economy was more or less flat, excluding the effect of the extra bank